To Enter the Work

Abstract

The ambient character of installation art results from the use of architectural strategies and techniques that effectively structure and organize perception. These include the territorialization of an entire site that the viewer can enter, the use of real materials rather than representations, and an emphasis on the literal interaction of the viewer with the work. Indeed, both the viewer and the space of the gallery, or site, play a constitutive role. In contrast to historiographies that trace its antecedents to land art, conceptual art, and minimalist sculpture, this article traces installation art to radical attempts by painters to spatialize the picture plane, expanding it to include “the totality of the real.” This is especially evident in works by Italian artists Giovanni Anselmo and Pier Paolo Calzolari, associated with the late 1960s movement, Arte Povera (Poor Art). A similar focus on spatial perception and the production of dynamic pictorial effects in an environment involving an engaged viewer makes the suspended glass Picture Gallery of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, completed in 1968, by Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) an important forerunner of installation art by an architect.